HOWTO: Access the vRealize Orchestrator Control Center when You’re #Awesome

OK so you’ve finally deployed vRealize Automation 7.x and you’re pretty chuffed with yourself because it only two 2 rollbacks on the Windows VMs, a new VA deployment and some on the fly configuration tweaks to get it working… You’re #Awesome.

You’re following VMware best practice and you have your embedded vRealize Orchestrator instance on your vRealize Automation Virtual Appliance(s). You #RockThisWorld

You’re on a role. but now you now have to install a new plugin for vRealize Orchestrator (lets say for Infoblox IPAM or F5 LTM), so you try https://vra.fqdn:8281/vco like you did on the vRO 6 appliance but get a “this site cannot be reached” message. You then remember, configuration was on 8283, so you try https://vra.fqdn:8283/vco-confg again with no luck and a “this site cannot be reached” message.

Finally you try https://vra.fqdn (after all this is vRA and that is where you used to download the IaaS Agent from ), you scan down and see the following:

Ah-ha! and you’re just about to click the vRealize Orchestrator Control Center link (which you suddenly remember was BETA in vRO 6) and you do a double take… what do you mean the service is stopped by default?

Hold on one goddamn minute! Did I ask for VMware to think about my security? Did I ask them to secure their solution by default to reduce the attack vector of my management platform? hell no! (but thank you for doing it anyway).

Luckily, the solution is relatively simple…

If you have enabled SSH during the installation of vRA7 or afterwards, you just need to SSH as root onto the appliance and run the service vco-configurator start command to start the service. Phew that WAS simple! If SSH isn’t enabled then you just need to enable it via the VAMI (https://vra.fqdn:5480) first.

Like wise when you want to stop the service you can just run the service vco-configurator stop command or reboot the appliance.

Now that highlights one issue. Every time you reboot the appliance, and then want to make changes to vRealize Orchestrator, you need to re-start the vco-configurator service again . Therefore during the implementation phase I tend to also run the chkconfig vco-configurator on command which means the service is automatically started on reboot.

Note: You can use the chkconfig vco-configurator off command to set it back to manual start before any service acceptance if required.